Permaculture thoughts

I was listening to Explorations in Permaculture a podcast that showcases various people involved in the permacuture movement. They had Jenny Pell, a permaculturist from Washington State who started the Wilder Institute on. The interviewer was talking about how she used to hang out with the alternative, organic people at college, and Jenny interrupted her and said that those kinds of people are not the alternative, not the far left, instead she said that they should be called, “the sane reverent people” because they’re not weird or foolish or on the fringe. There is no reason that republicans or conservative Christians couldn’t be interested in local economies and local food, there is every reason that everyone should want thriving healthy economies and food supplies. I feel very strongly that my own attempts at sustainability come out of my reverence for the world as well as my own logic and sanity. I want a beautiful bountiful world where my girls can go outside and pick fruit off trees and we don’t need to worry that they will get hurt from pesticides or strangers. I want a world where my neighbors and community are thriving and interesting and fulfilling. I want a world where I don’t need to hurt others so that I can thrive. It’s just getting there that takes patience.

And here’s another great quote from the show. It makes me think of David Abram’s ideas in The Spell of the Sensuous.

“Plant a seed and the ancestors speak through you. Plant a seed and you become the ancestor of future generations.”

David Abram also connects the ground beneath us with the past. I like the idea of the past having a solid place in the world. That which has come before us literally being beneath us. The detritus of my life composting among the leaves and bones rather than cluttering up my present.

I feel that connection to the past when I garden. The countless generations of people who pushed their fingers into the accumulation of centuries of acids wearing rocks into silt, clay and sand. The humus that formed around those particles as year after year of life decomposed and became the anchor for more life. Time that I can’t even really grasp created the soils we take for granted to grow our heirloom tomatoes and prolific zucchini. When I go to the beach at Lake Huron and see the rocks being washed over and over again by the waves they seem so solid, so impermeable. Yet that granite is what made most of the soil here in Michigan. So I plant my seeds and I do hope that I help the future generations when I push that small repository of DNA into the black earth.